Thursday, June 23, 2011

I found the Answer!

Yesterday I was reading West of Kabul, East of New York by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan-American. On page 122, he recollects a conversation with his kid brother Riaz. Riaz has become a devout Muslim, and explains his conversion by saying, "I realized that Islam would work.... If everyone followed these practices, none of today's problems would exist. Families would be rock-solid. There would be no warfare, no injustice, no division between the rich and the poor."

This sounded very familiar to me. In my novel (page 307) the teenage Elijah has also been seeking an answer to the injustices of the world. He falls in with the Rekhabites, a back-to-nomadism cult. The leader explains that all the wickedness of 9th Century BCE Israel is due to dividing the land and taking up farming instead of herding flocks. "If we all owned the land together, the strongest couldn't steal it. You can run your sheep on it, but you can't buy it or sell it or borrow against it. Right there you eliminate greed and envy.... Women are a problem. But we still don't have to behave like animals. A father should marry his children off young, before lust drives them to sin.... A man without a mate is a torch in a haystack. Though when men fight over a woman, she usually provoked it. You've got to teach a girl to cover up...."

It seems that every generation has its cult groups, political or religious, that offer simple rules to cope with the complexities of life. And there is never a shortage of young people (and some not-so-young) who are ready to follow the demagogue of the day.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

More avian tales

We spent yesterday in the hot sun, working on our chicken coop. It is about 90% finished. Sylvia researched what chickens need and got together with our neighbor Don, who is an architect. Don designed the coop, and his design was corrected by his father-in-law Dave, who is a contractor. As you can imagine, this is a rather fancy residence for the creatures. (We have 12 of them, shared between 3 households, and expect one or two to become roosters. We'll have to get rid of the roosters, since we're not allowed to keep them in the city.) We're trying to decide what color to paint it, and also what to call it. I've suggested Avian Arms or Henrietta Hilton, but Sylvia says those are hotel names, not permanent residence names. I know there used to be all-female residences in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but I can't remember any of their names. Any suggestions?

As I understand, chickens originated in east and southeast Asia. Per Wikipedia, they were used in Egypt for cock fighting as early as 1400 BCE, and were known as "the bird that lays every day," but not widely bred until around 300 BCE. I recently went to an exhibit on ancient Egypt at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and in that exhibit it said that the ancients didn't raise chickens. The Egyptians painted all kinds of scenes of daily life in their tombs--baking bread, hunting wild birds, brewing beer, even circumcising a guy--and we haven't found any any tomb paintings of chickens. Still, it seems odd that the ancient Egyptians, clever as they were, would just use "a bird that lays every day" for cockfighting for 1700 years.

Just to be on the safe side, though, I have the characters in my novel eating duck, goose, pigeon, roasted song birds, wild turtle eggs, and wild bird eggs, but not chicken or chicken eggs.